Crash
by cassierules
Summary: Quinn got into Yale. She's supposed to have a future, and all she sees there is Rachel. Trying to sort herself out after Finn's proposal, an accident on Lima's back roads could rip all of that away. Faberry endgame.


**IMPORTANT AUTHORS NOTE: **This chapter contains descriptions of violence, swearing, underage smoking and drinking, references to bullying and references to homosexuality and homosexual relationships. If any of that bothers or triggers you, please chose another, more appropriate fiction for you to read. This chapter might also contain potential spoilers for Episode 3x15, however, will probably not occur in canon, so if you are spoiler-free, I would consider this fiction okay to read. This is a multichapter fanfiction, and Faberry is the endgame ship. The events are set immediately following the Micheal Jackson episode, and disregards canon from The Spanish Teacher onward. Standard disclaimer applies. Please leave a review, but more importantly, ENJOY!

It's all ploughed out Midwestern farmland, where rich, dark, soil meets dry, tanned, grasses beside a road sprayed with gray gravel and in the in-between season of Winter-spring, tiny blue cubes of road salt. There's a fence that guards a solitary combed dirt divergence from the single road leading into Lima,Ohio, winding its way to the leaning tower of clay, slabs of cooled cement holding junkyard metal and wood together in something that might resemble what Tim Burton might do if he had a go at Little House on the Prairie. In her own prairie patterned dress, a whisper of sky-blue cotton that brushes her calves, she stands, leaning against the fence, legs wide apart, watching for the high beams from a pickup truck that slowly creaks its way up the road. It's chilly enough to warrant bright yellow wool coat and fur-trimmed wedges, and blowing on her freezing fingers as the pick-up pulls up beside her. He jumps out of the truck, right arm loaded with a six pack of beer, glass bottled and still shimmering with freezer-fresh condensation, a pack of cigarettes tucked inside the cardboard handle.

"Hey."

"Hey." She grins, and taps her fingers impatiently against the fence.

"I got you something, you know? Happy Valentine's Day and stuff."

She has to laugh at that, a soft sound that fills the stillness of the sky, where each shooting star is only a New York connector flying to Columbus. For one, it's now two weeks late. He tosses her the tiny square package, which she catches with ease while they amble up the path.

"It's Lana del Rey. My buddy, uh, Josh, he's really into the community and he knows a lot of people who are you know, who like girls-"

"Oh my God, David, just say it! _Les-bi-ans._", she laughs, and he gently brushes his knuckles against her shoulder.

"Well, whatever. So Josh's friend's met her, and she even signed the CD."

She flips open the front sleeve of the CD, and shakes with a silent giggle at a signature she doesn't recognize underneath "To Lucy..."

"Let me guess, Josh's friend? Lucy?"

"How'd you...Oh, yeah. Fuck it, man. I'm never gonna get my stupid GED, Luce.", he sighs, shoving aside the metal-bracketed rusted slab that serves as the doorway to their private paradise.

Inside, the disheveled country cottage is a testament to everything that should have been, could have and would have. A sheet of metal was bolted over a beautifully carved fireplace, only visible through the jagged slice they had carved through it the summer before. As it turned out, heating was easy in a place like this, as long as no one got cocky and left the fire burning long enough for anything to catch fire. The slump that remains of a back hallway, all cracking clay and ashes, reminds them, and when David flicks his lighter, Luce tiptoes over curled, deep-fried debris to a chest in the corner, where someone had once shoved a tasteful, if only slightly singed quilt, thick with what she can only imagine might be feathers from an entire generation of geese from the lake about two miles from where they are. Sometimes she wonders if any one but them know of this place, and if they do, why it still stands. Who owns the kind of land where some half burned out shell of the days when living might have meant something still teeters on the edge of destruction, ready to spill into roads never travelled, and the dying family farm?

Then she remembers.

No one really cares.

Luce spreads the quilt out on the cool, dusty floor, and tries not to sneeze when a cloud of sandy ash floats up, stinging at her eyes and throat. David lays the beer out in the center of their makeshift magic carpet, where a quilted pioneer girl skips rope in front of a red-brick schoolhouse. Between them, he splits the cigarettes, ripping at the paper divider in the box and tossing Luce half a pack while he lights his own. They sit cross-legged, across from each other, faces lit with a dull fire and still shrouded in puffs of smoke, each sipping from a bottle until none are left.

Despite the potential for debauchery, teenage jock and all-American girl, in an abandoned farmhouse in the Midwest, living the prohibition dreams of every roaring 20's secret couple, their pants stay on. Their voices never waver. Their laughter comes freely, and they're warm under the layers, and blankets Luce bought from the Salvation Army in Lima, that they keep under the quilt in its chest.

All they ever really do here, after all, is talk.

They're not really even supposed to be friends. Up until the past summer, they had shared the parties, the high-school letterman jacket prestige, and a disdain for each other that ran deep, but no one cared for explaining to a pair of fucked up kids who'd dented their golden futures, ten times over. That was just the way it worked in a small town, where cheerleader Luce had gotten pregnant, and spent a year craving the love and affection of every boy who came her way, before she'd finally hit the unforgiving spiral of denials, delusions, admittance, and self-hatred and crashed, a beautiful, scarred, pink-haired mess into this place, on the way to almost driving her car straight into the freight line.

The same town where hockey player David had gotten cocky, chased after his pathetic schoolboy crush the only way he knew how, and made it up in bruises and lumps, watching the other get everything he'd ever dreamed of while his life had spiraled so far out of control. Losing the scholarship, losing the team, and then, when his father had found out about the magazines and DVD's, the calls to that stupid Trevor Project and the visits to that club in Columbus? Losing a place to sleep, too. He's seen Luce smoking outside the front of the cottage, and he'd taken his seat beside her, chain-smoking two packs watching the sun set over the graying horizon beside her. Once he'd realized who she was, he's laughed himself silly over the irony of it all, and she downed the bottom of the bottle of vodka that had passed between them.

The town doesn't call them David or Luce, the names are their secrets, like this place is, too. The entire town, Luce tells him, when she gets some some weed from Patches, the homeless man who lives behind Sheets N' Things in town and waxes philosophical, is hiding something, and they're not any better or any worse for having the most fucked up secrets at all.

"Oh", she adds, that night when she's dressed like Janis Joplin and he's squishing his toes in the fresh summer dirt, "I bet this whole fucking town is gay, too. It's probably in the water."

They've both gotten "better" since then, if you wax over Luce's scheming to get her baby back (she quit) and David's three-digit nightly pleasure tab at Scandals (he quit), but he guesses no one really ever gets better. If they're Born this Way like Josh, his counselor tells him, they may as well get used to feeling halfway to shit. Like David's Mom's calendar used to say, Misery loves Company.

The company's nice.

Alcohol loosens Luce up a lot. Every time. It doesn't do much to David, but he figures it's only because she's so tiny, like a real life Barbie who's never going to look alive behind the eyes again. The other guys, guys like him, call him a bear cub, and he's big and stocky besides. Now, she's giggling and playing with the fringe of the quilt, flicking the CD jacket open and closed, smiling and telling Dave all the latest McKinley High gossip. He feels he shouldn't care at all, what happens to the has-beens of the future, until he realizes the two of them, they're the two biggest has-beens here. So he holds on as much as Josh does to Entertainment Tonight, and lives vicariously with her, through those kids who have everything and will never, never, know it.

Mercedes, the big black girl he just knows his father whispered about when he waited for David outside hockey practice, is dating Shane, some big black guy on the football team. Luce giggles that Mercedes told her, in _con-fi-dence_ (she tells David that her method books say that a good actress always enunciates) that she still had feelings for Sam, and that whitebread prince will do anything to win her over. David stifles a chuckle, because before his dad kicked him out, he knew for sure the Evans' worst secret wasn't just that they were dirt-poor. Ever since he threw dollars at their son at Scandals, though, he thinks it's good. If Sam loves this girl, and she loves him, too, that's all anyone can wish for, isn't it? He lays back on the quilt and imagines maybe their babies would look like Beyonce.

Because David knows love is all anyone can wish for, he won't ask about him. Luce glosses over, and her eyes glisten with a fresh sheen of stars as she makes her announcement.

"David. David. Look at me." He does.

"I. Got. Into. Yale." Perfectly enunciated.

"_IgotintoYale_!" So loud that the burned-out slump of half the house shudders.

David stares at her dumbstruck, not quite sure what to say, his dry lips forming a perfect O.

"Holy shit. I mean that's great, Luce. Who-Who'd you tell?", he sputters, still slightly shocked. A tiny twinge of pride tugs him forward into her arms, and they share a soft, long, and surprisingly sweet embrace over the pile of cigarette butts gathered between them. She's come so far. He should know, because he has, too.

Luce breaks the hug, and her pearly teeth glisten in the final flecks of their dying fire, hey eyes full of light and life, sparkle and evidence that the ice queen still has a beating heart. David's so gay he's pissed Tom Brady's married to Giselle, but he knows she looks gorgeous, stunning, even, lipgloss cracked away and mascara running down her face, carving rivers into her cheeks.

"I...I told the Glee club. I-I s-sang that Micheal Jackson song, y-you know? Never Can Say Goodby-", her voice is breaking, dissolving into alcohol-fueled sobs as she desperately tries to wipe away at her tears.

"Yeah." He offers, dumb and awkwardly as ever.

"I g-gave them a speech and I said Thank You. And I looked at her, David. The entire time, just hoping that she would know. That she would throw that ring back in his stupid, smirking face and-"

"What ring, Luce? What fucking ring?"

She sinks, suddenly looking so much smaller, drawing the blankets around her to shield from an invisible chill.

"Finn proposed. Rachel is marrying that idiot and she is never going to get it right!"

A moment of stunned silence passes, and Luce just cries. Silent tears, saturating the collar of her jacket and dripping into the glass bottle held in her shaking fingers.

Then she remembers.

No one really cares_. Especially not Rachel. _

David stares blankly past her. What the fuck is he supposed to say?

Rachel and Luce, they were a lot like David and...(he still won't say his name. It fucking hurts.) A lot like them. Except Luce? She had it together. She was gonna make her dreams come true, and all of her dreams were Rachel, are Rachel. David has Josh, he has the other bears, he'll get over _him_.

Luce had Rachel. That blind little girl is probably the only reason she isn't dead right now.

He watches her cry and cry, and drink, choke, sputter, and cry some more. She tries to light a cigarette and burns her fingers, drops the lighter and cradles her hand close to her chest, letting the tears drip on to raw, blistering, skin.

The fire's gone by now, and a frozen breeze blows through a glassless window shuttered with panels of cracked wood. They've been meeting like this for months, and when he crosses the threshold of ashy black tar, scuffing his jeans in the dark, her cold, rigid, body folds, defeated, into his arms.

He wants to tell her it'll all be okay. That it gets better, and there must be a whole world, there in New Haven, Connecticut, that loves her. He bites back the bitter laugh that rises from those lies. Instead, he holds her close to his chest, pulls her up, away from here, stumbling to the door.

They're gay. They deserve pain.

David squeezes her hand gently, careful not to hurt her any more. They leave the one unopened bottle of beer, his lighter and most of the cigarettes, the quilts and the blanket. He wants to leave her bleeding heart there, too.

He guides her up the path, holding her closely to the rough denim of his jacket, so she won't take a fall on the sharp rocks he kicks aside in front of them. Wordlessly, she climbs into the passenger seat of his car, and he comes around to the driver's seat, revs the engine and waits for it to heat up.

"Don't." Thin, breathless.

"Don't what, Luce? I'm gonna take you home. Or whatever, if you wanna go to my place and crash, fine."

Her fist connects with his bicep, and she aims a glare at him over the center console. "You're drunk. We can't- _I don't want to die._", she pleads.

"I'm not that drunk. I'm not like you chicks getting tipsy.", he tells her, grinning, hoping maybe she'll crack a tiny smile.

"David. _Please._"

He pulls the keys and tosses them into the back. They're silent, each thinking of the person who sent their lives down diverging forks, downward spirals, and here, to an empty, old, pick-up, on the only road leading into Nowheresville, America, under the same half-moon as the other person, living their life with everything that they will never know they have. Thoughts racing, regrets racing so fast that they don't notice the high beam flash, or the tires burning to stop on dulled gravel.

All they realize is the _crash,_ the explosion of metal, and glass, and the fierce jerk that topples the car into directions unknown. Luce hears sharp crunches, and cries out on a darkening, empty, stage, closing fast with bleeding curtains. She grapples and screams and kicks where she can, what she can, until her throat closes with the slamming wave of pain, and a gold rope flashes before her eyes, sweeping the curtains closed in an ocean of swirling red.

When she wakes up again, the gold rope pulls the curtains open on a landscape of flashing lights, and a screaming carnival clown's voice in her ear.

"Can you hear me? Miss? Can you hear me?" Over and over, sweeping spotlights and a crescendo of sirens.

She wants to turn off the phone, and hang up on these ridiculous idiots. She wants to look at the photos of Yale and New Haven on her wall at home, she wants to curl into her bed with a pint of ice cream and call Santana and cry. Then she wants to send David a message on Facebook and spend the night in their special place. She wants to stop the ringing, so she squeezes her hand, and tries to feel for the screen lock on her phone and shut it off.

_Where is it? _

"..._Dead_, Officer. Head on collision coming off the T, he missed the turn, went straight and bowled over the kids. The two of them-"

Luce's heart stops when she hears _Dead_.

She can't be. She can't go to hell, yet.

When she's old and there isn't a life worth living anymore, she'll go willingly, and serve out her pregnant teenage cheater closeted lesbian punk sentence in fire and brimstone. She won't fight, or protest, she'll take her place in the flames and shut her sinner's mouth.

Her fingers reach out desperately, until they connect with the hard outside of a paramedic's bracelet. Finally, she's found that stupid phone, and she can turn off this ringing and these people. Luce grips tightly as she can, ignoring the slippery liquid that's covered the outside of her phone. The lock's got to be somewhere.

"Miss? Miss, can you hear me?" Again, and again, and she just wants it to stop.

She can feel hands grabbing for her, something hard being shoved against her body. Someone's pulling at her, prying her away from her phone. They don't want her to turn it off.

Suddenly, she's screaming against another crush of overwhelming pain, so loudly she can almost feel her throat ripping into itself.

"Miss? Do you remember your name right now? Miss? Please stay with me."

She has to tell them something, because the curtains are closing again and jolted, she's realized what they are. Blood, everywhere, cut through with a gold rope, a flashlight being burned into her eyes. On this black stage, far, far, off-Broadway, where the distant pinpricks of light are only New York connectors, Lucy Quinn Fabray has one line, and only one in the spotlight.

"I got into Yale.", she mumbles, her mouth thick with copper. "_I'm supposed to have a future._"

She repeats over and over again. She hopes someone gets it right.

"We'll do our best, Miss."

More screaming. More pain. Somewhere in the night, a phone is ringing and a baby is crying and Rachel Berry is curled beside Finn Hudson, whispering how much he loves her diamond-studded ears, holding her tiny left hand in his, admiring the cheap ring she only ever wears in private.

It's all too much, so in that pivotal moment, the curtain falls. Crashes. Plummets.

The house goes dark.

The show is over.

No applause.

AN: I know Quinn and Karofsky have hardly ever interacted in the actual premise of the show, but I had originally written interaction to happen because of a Glee spoiler I had read, then built the premise of them having bonded over essentially being closeted gays in Lima during Quinn's skank days, perhaps when Karofsky was also going through some rough times at home, presumably before he found the bear community, and the inspiration for the cottage where they meet is actually a real place just a little out of town. I remember driving by it going on camping trips, which I think used to be a guide house along the road.

For the people with more technical imaginations, the car crash in this story would have happened on what's called a T intersection, you know, where a smaller road connects to a larger, or main road, creating a T-shape if you're coming in from the smaller road. Quinn and Karofsky's car would have been in the shoulder of the main road, facing heading out of Lima, and directly in front of the smaller one, meaning a speeding driver who missed turning either left or right would collide with them, and depending on the vehicle size and speed, cause a rollover or considerable drivers' side damage, and probably some injury to the passenger as well. I'm not sure exactly how well that came across, but in case anyone was confused, I suppose.

Finally, they call each other David and Luce just because I wanted an element of anonymity between them in the story. Like Karofsky laughing at the irony of when he figured out who Quinn was, in my imagination, the two of them feel safe with each other because they're almost talking with a different person who they can convince themselves hasn't also judged and hurt them in the past. Twisted, I guess, but if I were either one of them, I would be, too. There are some more details of their "relationship" I plan to work in to future chapters, but only if there's any kind of demand for them. Otherwise, Karofsky won't be a large part of this story or this universe.

Any more questions, just drop me an ask on my Tumblr. My url is fortyseven-c4ts.


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